Considerable research and development by various laboratories, universities, and companies, have attempted for several decades to automate the process of annotating text to improve pronunciations by speech synthesizers.
Arthur Lessac's book, “The Use and Training of the Human Voice,” (3rd Edition) is described as being based on over forty years of research and experience. It is used as a teacher's guide for instructing theatrical stage performers. His work describes a scientifically developed, and carefully validated, kinesensic theory of voice training and use. “Kinesensics” is known as a systematic study of the relationship between nonlinguistic body motions, for example blushes, shrugs, or eye movement, and communication. Arthur Lessac extended the usage to include resonant feedback of sound production and controllable body changes that can add effect to the spoken content. Experimentation and validation of this work continues today through members and associates of the Lessac Institute (www.lessacinstitute.com). Arthur Lessac's work led him to observe that “music is speech and speech is music.” While vowels were viewed as musically significant, Arthur Lessac also demonstrated that consonants themselves are musical and can be considered as a musical “orchestra” in their own right.
The effect of kinesensic instruction is often demonstrable. Acoustic data for speakers trained using the Lessac method have been shown to have speech and musical formants simultaneously present in their speech. Furthermore, their abilities to consciously control pitch change profiles, inflections, and articulatory variations in their speech are superior to those who have not been trained using kinesensic feedback principles.
International patent publication No. WO 2005/088,606 discloses a method of prosodic text coding for use in computerized speech systems.
The foregoing description of background art may include insights, discoveries, understandings or disclosures, or associations together of disclosures, that were not known to the relevant art prior to the present invention but which were provided by the invention. Some such contributions of the invention may have been specifically pointed out herein, whereas other such contributions of the invention will be apparent from their context. Merely because a document may have been cited here, no admission is made that the field of the document, which may be quite different from that of the invention, is analogous to the field or fields of the present invention.